Fermenting with Wild Yeast

It’s spring and that means rhubarb and strawberries, a classic combination. Turn these fruits into fermented strawberry rhubarb soda and you have a real treat!

I love refreshing fermented sodas like root beer and ginger ale. But since I’ve learned to ferment with wild yeast, I may not go back to my former ways of fermenting soda and other beverages like lemonade. Wild fermentation is so much easier than keeping a ginger bug active, and a plus for those who can’t use whey which is a dairy product.Continue Reading

It’s not often that I accept a guest post, but I’m delighted that Kelsey Steffen said yes when I asked her to write a guest post on the benefits of sourdough and talk about her eBook, Everyday Sourdough: Easy Recipes for the Everyday Baker.

I’m a huge fan of sourdough, so it may surprise you that I have no other posts on my site about the topic. Because my husband and I only eat about 2 loafs of bread a month, I’ve never felt that it was worth my while to bake my own. We’re blessed to know an amazing baker and barter bread for garden produce!

I wholeheartedly agree with Kelsey about the benefits of baking with sourdough. I particularly have trouble with yeast breads, but do perfectly fine with sourdough. Kelsey explains why in her post below.

Yogurt is a staple in our home. Making it homemade saves us money, but more importantly I like knowing just what goes into the food we eat. It’s really an easy process, and I’ll share a few ways to make homemade yogurt without a yogurt maker.Continue Reading

Refreshing Fermented Sodas

There’s something about a hot summer day that says soda, don’t you think? For me, it’s the childhood memory of Sundays at the lake with friends and cousins, sipping root beer, that makes me crave that taste. Soda is not a part of my diet anymore, unless it’s a refreshing fermented soda like homemade root beer.

We played a lot in the woods at the lake and, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, that’s where I fell in love with plants. What I didn’t know back then was that I would be foraging two of those plants in the very same woods for homemade root beer syrup.Continue Reading

Why Fermentation?

When you think of preserving the harvest do canning, freezing, and dehydrating come to mind? Have you wondered how ourancestors preserved food before the days of modern refrigeration and canning? One method they used was to preserve vegetables through lacto-fermentation in stoneware crocks.

When canning was found to be more shelf stable and easily shipped, lacto-fermentation fell by the wayside. So why would we even consider fermenting vegetables today? Canning preserves food by destroying bacteria that causes spoilage. In the process, many nutrients are also destroyed. Lacto-fermentation, on the other hand, preserves food by growing the good bacteria present on all vegetables–lactobacillus.Continue Reading

When a new book arrives in the mail, it better not be time to make dinner. ‘Cause dinner will definitely be late and my nose will be in that book. This was doubly true when The New Wildcrafted Cuisine by Pascal Baudar arrived a few weeks ago.